Commentary | Letters: More thoughts on Hijab sexy-ness, rights for the unborn, meatogyny

Rupert Common can’t have earned much of an education during his summer’s stay on Vancouver’s east side, because his article smacks of spoiled, stupid rich boy. The neighbourhood he describes is far from poor – lower middle class, perhaps, but rent prices in Vancouver being what they are these days, an apartment there could easily go for the same price as an apartment in a far ritzier area of Montreal. It’s attitudes like his that are the reason why Vancouver’s downtown eastside has been so ghettoized – when it was once the thriving downtown core.

If Rupert doesn’t want to accept what comes with affordable rent in Vancouver (four Laundromats in two blocks? The horror!), maybe he should move back in with Mummy and Daddy. Then he’d have someone to put band-aids on his booboos the next time he fell off of his bicycle. Until then, he should keep his “stuffed upper-crust of society” ideas to himself.

Victoria Schmidt

U0 Science

Did you read my article, Ezra?

Re: “Thoughts on the hijab’s sexy-ness” | Commentary | Oct. 27

I thought The Daily didn’t publish sexist letters? Jokes!

Ezra Black’s letter caused a bit of distraught in my little baby blue veiled head. It’s funny that the comments I’ve received (from males) in regards to my column have been using the same line of argument against which I wrote; there’s the tendency to follow that essentialist mode of thinking.

First of all, I cannot emphasize this enough: sexuality is a part of identity more holistically than what we understand in the mainstream. Sexuality encompasses behaviour, values, and mores. A nun’s outfit is telling of her sexuality – we know that she is celibate (not necessarily asexual) and we know her reasoning.

Black seems to equate sexuality with sexiness, an unfortunately dominant misunderstanding. Sexiness is explicit expression of sex. Furthermore, what the hell did he mean by “In theory the hijab is sexy?” I have nothing to contend here, I’m just hella confused.

Yet the most offensive words Black wrote had to do with his assertion that “Western girls do possess…the freedom to present themselves as they see fit.”

I guess being raised in North America with American and Canadian values and a set of ovaries doesn’t really make me a Western woman, eh? I’ll go return to the “East” then if you don’t mind, Mr. Huntington.

Finally we move onto his comments on beauty, i.e. subjective eye pleasure! He says flaunt it, and I say just stay away from Girlicious.

By saying that beauty needs to be flaunted the way nature intended it to be, he’s subscribing to my “shaking the ass to assert sexual liberation” point. I’ve had to condense my points for obvious reasons, but if Black would like to continue this, we can take it outside. And by outside I mean aristotleslackey@mcgilldaily.com.

Creepy side note: I saw Black writing this letter in the AUS lab.

Sana Saeed

U3 Honours Political Science and Middle East Studies

Daily columnist

Please stop quoting Vice

Re: Vice’s wisdom on the working class | Commentary | Oct.27

This is in response to the letter asking The Daily to “stop writing about St. Henri.”

If you’re so choked about hipsters hyping your working-class hood, I’d recommend NOT attacking them with a quote you found in Vice Magazine. It kind of blows your cover. Thanks for the laugh, though!

Marianna Reis

U2 International Development Studies & History

Daily, you can do better

I’d like to express my disappointment with the lack of queer content in the October 27 issue of The Daily. In the last month, I’ve grown accustomed to opening this once reasonable paper and finding at least one Hyde Park, article, or letter shitting on Queer McGill and/or offending me in ways I didn’t think possible.

And yet, I’d come to love the frustration of having an organization I work hard to run and improve take a beating from people with little-to-no understanding of what or why our politics and policies are.

I waited expectantly for the newest letter taken straight to the press without first filing any complaints or talking with QM. Most of all, I looked forward to bass-ackwards opinions and debates about my communities and hormone levels that would provide endless fodder for arguments among my straight-bashing, queer-exclusive, politically-mobile friends.

Daily readers and editors, you can do better.

Love and kisses,

Ren Haskett

U2 Honours Women’s Studies

Equity and Policy Coordinator for Queer McGill

Let’s include the unborn

I would like to address some of the concerns of those who have reservations about Choose Life, the new pro-life club at McGill.

First, we in no way want to minimize the suffering of women who find themselves with emotionally or financially difficult pregnancies, and indeed, an important part of our mandate is to make the choice for life a realistic choice for McGill students and other women by connecting them with appropriate resources, such as free or low-cost clothing, counseling, etc.

However, we do hope to encourage reflection on precisely some of the issues raised at the last SSMU Council meeting: namely, human rights, discrimination, and oppression. I trust that our interim status will be a period of opportunity for students to reflect that the present lack of protection of unborn human persons in Canadian law is no less worth questioning and challenging than was the legal status quo before women were recognized as persons in Canadian law.

We do not wish to provoke or offend any person or group – we simply strive for a more universal recognition and embrace of the rights and dignity of all human persons, including the unborn.

Amy Bergeron

U2 Religious Studies

Not all men are meatogynists

Re: “The meat doesn’t make the man” | Culture | Oct. 27

I don’t usually write to The Daily, but the recent article on “meatogyny” saddened me enough to warrant a response. In it, the author, Sean Iacurti suggests that the prevalence of women among vegetarians in western societies is due to a commonality that women feel toward the subjugated position of cattle and swine. They, therefore, show solidarity to their fellow oppressed by turning to greens. On the other hand, men practice their primeval rite of gender affirmation through “dominating animals” by eating meat in greater numbers.

Here’s my counter example: Any anthropologist will tell you that rural India exhibits far greater patriarchal tyranny than our own society, as evidenced by the thousands of honour killings perpetrated annually against women. And yet the male dominated social and religious institutions exist amid the highest rates of vegetarianism in the world, to the point that less than 30 per cent of Indians are regular meat eaters.

When cultural commentators seek to associate all that they perceived as a social evil as descending from the patriarchy, they dull the capacity of sociology to reveal social injustice and waste its energies on ludicrous wild goose chases. If you believe meat production is tyrannical, that is not a very hard case to make. But blaming meat production on maleness – in the same way that racism, environmental decay, war, and class structure all have been in the past – in no way advances the cause of feminism and in fact waters down our ability to address substantive issues of gender inequality.

Here, I would like to petition the reader against cheapening the platform of feminism by seeking to amalgamate unrelated issues under its banner, and capitalizing upon its momentum by bandwagoning our disparate social ideals to it.

Santiago Perez

U2 Sociology

More letters were received than could be printed; they’ll appear soon. Send your non-hateful letters to letters@mcgilldaily.com.